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As Fidel Castro ails, US readies for mass influx of boat people from Cuba

12-13-2006, 18h50

FORT LAUDERDALE, United States

With longtime Cuban president Fidel Castro ailing, the US Coast Guard is bracing for a mass migration to US shores from the Caribbean nation, just 144 kilometers (90 miles) across the Florida Straits.

Peering at a map of the region Tuesday ahead of an exercise, with the current positions of a dozen ships marked off by flags, Coast Guard Rear Admiral David Kunkel said they had a clear mission: to stop the exodus.

"We don't want to be caught off guard," said Kunkel, who was leading the exercise on responding to a mass migration from what the guard insists could be "any Caribbean nation" to the southeastern state of Florida.

But the timing is no coincidence.

Castro, who has led the only communist country in the Americas for more than four decades, has been out of sight for months after intestinal surgery, and expectations are rising that the 80 year old leader might soon pass from power.

The country of more then 11 million is a short hop away by speedboat; smugglers usually charge up to 10,000 dollars a person to transport migrants from Cuba.

Adding to the potential for a big influx: US law allows any Cuban who reaches US soil to stay, work and gain residency and expedited US citizenship.

The law has encouraged tens of thousands of Cubans to attempt the often deadly trip across the straits, often on unsafe or homemade watercraft.

For years Cuba's close watch on its people, Cuban coast guard patrols and US naval patrols have kept the migration situation generally manageable, with some noteworthy exceptions.

In 1980 Fidel Castro, pressuring the United States on migration policy, let Cubans who wanted to leave depart from the port of Mariel. In five months, 125,000 fled for the United States. Many lived in refugee camps in Florida until they could be resettled.

Fourteen years later, 36,000 Cubans set sail on rafts for the United States in a new crisis. Both major exoduses created humanitarian crises and exacerbated ethnic tensions in Miami.

Now, as Cuban defense chief Raul Castro leads Cuba in his brother's still somewhat mysterious absence, the US fears the controls on migration could fail.

If Cuba at any point allows its people take to the seas, chaos could be a nice term for what ensues as some of the 1.25 million Cuban-Americans -- two thirds of whom live in Florida -- head there to collect friends and relatives, while others in Cuba try to get out and head for the United States.

While most of the 400 officials joining the Coast Guard exercise here made a point of avoiding the word Cuba, the convention center where the exercise was conducted was dotted with press reports on the 1994 rafters crisis.

"It is no secret, mass migrations from Cuba over here," Kunkel acknowledged.

But Cuba hasn't been the only source of mass migrations to the United States from the Caribbean. In the 1970s and 1980s, more than 50,000 Haitians arrived by sea fleeing the dictatorships of the Duvaliers in Haiti.

On August 1, a day after Fidel Castro ceded power to Raul, Florida Governor Jeb Bush urged the federal government to prepare to cope with mass migration by sea.

Cuban-American Senator Mel Martinez added at the time that if it becomes necessary to send US Navy and Coast Guard ships to block the Florida Straits, that should be done.

Kunkel made it clear that standing US policy would remain in effect: anyone picked up on the high seas would repatriated to his country of origin.

"We do not want that, we are worried about their safety. Do not come," he stressed.

US authorities plan to practice the response with staff and ships in March, if an influx towards Florida does not start before then.

Meanwhile a state official, Amos Rojas, warned local Cuban-Americans from planning rescue trips to their homeland, saying that it remains illegal under US law to go to Cuba. "It is very dangerous," he said.

And Miami police sent an e-mail to reporters Tuesday alerting recipients of "unsubstantiated rumors about Fidel Castro's 'possible death,'" The Miami Herald reported on Wednesday, noting that Governor Bush had been alerted about the rumours.